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* a man without a country armageddon in retrospect asterisk bagombo snuff box between time and timbuktu billy pilgrim bluebeard bokonon bokononism breakfast of champions canary in a cathouse cat's cradle deadeye dick fates worse than death galapagos god bless you dr. kevorkian god bless you mr. rosewater goodbye blue monday happy birthday wanda june

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.






Механическое пианино (Утопия 14) - цитаты

Вторник, 10 Ноября 2009 г. 11:32 + в цитатник
verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора << Просто в чертовское время мы живем. Идиотская задача иметь дело с людьми, которым следовало бы приспособиться к новым идеям. А люди не приспосабливаются, в этом-то вся беда. Хотел бы я родиться через сто лет, когда уже все привыкнут к переменам.
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<< Пол с огорчением подумал, что люди, разрушающие какую-либо систему, всегда вызывают восхищение у тех, кто покорно следует этой системе.
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<< Однако для Шеферда жизнь была площадкой для гольфа. С целыми сериями начал и окончаний, со строгим ведением счета набранных очков – для сравнения с другими партиями – после розыгрыша каждой лунки. Он постоянно огорчался или радовался победам или поражениям, которых никто, кроме него, и не замечал, однако всегда со стоицизмом относился к правилам игры.
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<< И почему только так должно было случиться? – Это прозвучало как еще одно пустое эхо вопроса, который человечество задает уже миллионы лет. Можно иногда подумать, что люди и на свет-то рождаются только для того, чтобы задать его!
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<< Он справлялся со своими обязанностями – тут уж ничего не скажешь, однако у него не было того, что было у его отца, у Кронера, у Шеферда и многих других: искренней веры в значимость того, что они делают; способности принять душой – почти так, как это делает влюблен – ный, – корпорационную личность, всемогущую и всеведущую. Короче говоря, Полу не хватало того, что делало его отца воинствующим и великим: способности всерьез воспринимать все это.
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Понедельник, 09 Ноября 2009 г. 13:15 + в цитатник
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Kurt Vonnegut: Selected Bibliography

Воскресенье, 08 Ноября 2009 г. 14:03 + в цитатник
verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора (via Universität Paderborn)

Bibliographies
Fiene, Donald M. "Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR: A Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography. 45, 4 (1988): 223-232.
Hudgens, Betty L. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Checklist. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1972.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Asa Pieratt, eds. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Descriptive Bibliography and Annotated Secondary Checklist. London: The Nether Press, 1972.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, Asa Pieratt, and Stanley Schatt, eds. "The Vonnegut Bibliography." The Vonnegut Statement: Original Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Eds. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer. New York: Delta Books, 1973. 255-277.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. "The Vonnegut Bibliography." Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Eds. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Donald L. Lawler. New York: Delta Books, 1977. 217-52.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, and Asa B. Pieratt, Jr., eds. Kurt Vonnegut: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987.
Reed, Peter J.; Baepler, Paul. “Kurt Vonnegut: A Selected Bibliography, 1985-1992.” Bulletin of Bibliography. 50, 2 (June 1993): 123-28.
Schatt, Stanley, and Jerome Klinkowitz, eds. "A Kurt Vonnegut Checklist." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. 12, 3 (1971): 70-76.
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Delacorte Press

Суббота, 07 Ноября 2009 г. 13:01 + в цитатник
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Delacorte Press paperback covers

 (295x450, 30Kb) (298x450, 41Kb)

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Пятница, 06 Ноября 2009 г. 12:57 + в цитатник
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Kurt Vonnegut: Selected Bibliography

Четверг, 05 Ноября 2009 г. 11:57 + в цитатник
verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора (via Universität Paderborn)

Selected Dissertation Abstracts
Austin, Marvin Fraley, Jr. "The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Confrontation with the Modern World." DAI. 36 (1975): 3707A.
Bonadonna, Reed Robert. "'Served This Soldiering Through': Language, Masculinity, and Virtue in the World War II Soldier’s Novel." DAI. 59, 6 (Dec 1998):2015A.
Boon, Kevin Alexander. "Framing Chaos: Law in the Margin Chaos in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 56, 4 (Oct 1995): 1352A-53A.
Brown, Kevin Ray. "Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain: Influence, Affinities, and Contradictions." DAI. 57, 12 (June 1997): 5148A.
Camara, George C. "War and the Literary Extremist: The American War Novel, 1945-1970." DAI. 34 (1974): 5160A.
Davis, Todd Fleming Jefferson. "Comforting Lies: Postmodern Morality in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 56, 10 (1996): 3955A.
Edwards, Mary Janet Bailey. "Vonnegut's Dresden Story: The Cathartic Struggle." DAI. 58, 8 (Feb 1998): 3126A.
Fitzgerald, Sister Ellen. "World War II in the American Novel: Hawkes, Heller, Kosinski, and Vonnegut." DAI. 35 (1974): 3736A-37A.
Gerson, Steven Marc. "Paradise Sought: Adamic Imagery in Selected Novels by Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 39 (1978): 285A.
Gholson, Bill D. "Rhetoric, Identity, and Morality in Selected Later Novels of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 55, 11 (May 1995): 3511A.
Goldsmith, David H. "The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 31 (1970): 2916A.
Goshorn, James W. "The Queasy World of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Satire in the Novels." DAI. 32 (1972): 6426A-27A.
Group, Robert James. "Familiar Novelties: Kurt Vonnegut's Comic Epics in Prose." DAI. 39 (1978): 1567A.
Haddawy, Diana Elizabeth. "Not Silence Is the Rest: Modern Treatments of the Hamlet Dilemma." DAI. 55, 12 (June 1995): 3841A.
Hancock, Joyce Ann. "Kurt Vonnegut and the Folk Society." DAI. 39 (1978): 3580A.
Harris, Charles B. "Contemporary Ameican Novelists of the Absurd." DAI. 31 (1971): 4162A.
Hearron, William T. "New Approaches in the Post-Modern American Novel: Joseph heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan." DAI. 34 (1973): 3398A-99A.
Hoffman, Thomas Paul. "The Theme of Loneliness in Vonnegut’s First Four Novels." DAI. 39 (1979): 4256A57A.
Keough, William Richard. "Violence and American Humor." DAI. 37 (1976): 2182A-83A.
Labin, Linda. "The Whale and the Ash-Heap: Transfigurations of Jonah and Job in Modern American Literature: Frost, MacLeish, and Vonnegut." DAI. 41, 11 (May 1981): 4713A.
Landis, Kathleen M. "The Rhetoric of Madness." DAI. 53, 9 (1993): 3209A.
Leeds, Marc. "What Goes Around, Comes Around: The Naive-Schizophrenic-Resurrected Cycle in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 48, 5 (Nove 1987): 1204A.
Loeb, M. C. "Vonnegut's Duty-Dance with Death: Theme and Structure in Slaughterhouse-Five." DAI. 41 (1980): 51C.
Lonie, Charles Anthony. "Acculmulations of Silence: Survivor Psychology in Vonnegut, Twain, and Hemingway." DAI. 35 (1975): 7871A.
Marino, Vincent. "Creating Conscience through Black Humor: A Study of Kurt Vonnegut’s Novels." DAI. 39 (1978): 2941A.
Mathews, Marsha Caddell. "Death and Humor in the Fifties: The Ignition of Barth, Heller, Nabokov, O'Connor, Salinger, and Vonnegut." DAI. 48, 7 (Jan 1988): 1770A.
McGinnis, Wayne D. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Confrontation with Meaninglessness." DAI. 35 (1974): 3753A-54A.
Moore, Janet Cecilia. "The Feminine Pharmakon: Circe in the Twentieth Century." DAI. 54, 3 (Sept 1993): 925A.
Nandyal, Ramakrishna. "Thematic Unity in the Early Vonnegut Fiction: 'Player Piano' (1952) to 'Slapstick' (1976)." DAI. 49, 10 (Apr 1989): 3027A.
Pendleton, Edith Kay. "Cinderella Imagery in the Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 55, 1 (July 1994): 85A-86A.
Rice, Elaine Fritz. "The Satire of John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: The Menippean Tradition in the 1960's in America." DAI. 35 (1975): 7876A-77A.
Sachner, Mark Jeffrey. "Failure as Human and Literary Form." DAI. 42, 5 (Nov 1981): 2123A.
Schatt, Stanley. "The World Picture of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 31 (1970): 767A.
Shaw, William Gary. "Comic Absurdity and the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 36 (1976): 7427A.
Shor, Ira N. "Vonnegut's Art of Inquiry." DAI. 32 (1971): 3331A.
Somer, John L. "Quick-Stasis: The Rite of Initiation in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 32 (1972): 4025A.
St. Germain, Amos Joseph. "Religious Interpretation and Contemporary Literature: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Robert Coover and John Barth." DAI. 35 (1975): 4552A.
Strehle, Susan. "Black Humor in Contemporary American Fiction." DAI. 37 (1976): 319A.
Waxman, Robert Ernest. "Updike, Gass, and Vonnegut: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction." DAI. 38 (1978): 4173A.
Weinstein, Sharon. "Comedy and Nightmare: The Fiction of John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jerzy Kosinski, and Ralph Ellison." DAI. 32 (1971): 3336A.
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The Bomb: Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Среда, 04 Ноября 2009 г. 12:38 + в цитатник
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The passage on Kurt Vonnegut from
Ronald Paulson. Sin and evil: moral values in literature


Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is about another holocaust, but one inficted not by the Nazis but by the Allied bomber command: Billy Pilgrim and his author are both sufering the Dresden bombing and the traumatic afterefects, but they are victims, not the perpetrators, of the fre-bombing—though little distinction is made between friends and enemies. They sufer with the Germans.
The story of Slaughterhouse-Five, like that of Catch-22, is about the ways people deal with traumas—Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians, Roland Weary and the Three Musketeers. But the traumas include war as only one of man’s sufering-evils; besides wars there are glaciers and “plain old death,” accidental and natural, and the Holocaust. The odor of Billy’s breath when drunk, “mustard gas and roses,” turns out to be the odor of the decaying bodies in Dresden bomb shelters, and the description of naked feet, whether of dead soldiers or the living Billy Pilgrim, as “ivory and blue,” equates the living with their inevitable death. And there is the veteran who after surviving the war becomes an elevator operator, catches his wedding ring in the elevator’s ornamental iron lace, and “the car squashed him. So it goes.”
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Kurt Vonnegut: Selected Bibliography

Вторник, 03 Ноября 2009 г. 12:48 + в цитатник
verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора (via Universität Paderborn)

Selected Interviews
Abádi-Nagy, Zoltan. "Serenity, Courage, Wisdom: A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut, 1989." The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Eds. Peter J. Reed and Mark Leeds. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. 15-34.
Allen, William Rodney, and Paul Smith. "An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut." Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Ed. Allen, William Rodney. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1988. 265-301.
Anonymous. "The Conscience of the Writer." Publishers' Weekly, 199 (22 March 1971): 26-28.
Bellamy, Joe David, and John Casey. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Ed. Bellamy, Joe David. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1974. 194-207.
Bryan, C. D. B. "Kurt Vonnegut, Head Bokononist." New York Times Book Review (6 April 1969): 2, 25.
Clancy, L. J. "Running Experiments Off: An Interview." Meanjin Quarterly. 30 (Autumn 1971): 46-54.
Gussow, Mel. "Vonnegut Is Having Fun Doing a Play." New York Times (6 October 1970): 56.
Hayman, David, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, and Richard L. Rodes. "Kurt Vonnegut: The Art of Fiction LXIV." Paris Review. 69 (Spring 1977): 57-103.
Imamura, Tateo. "Vonnegut in Tokyo: An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut." Eigo Seinen. 130 (1984): 262-266.
Kramer, Carol. "Kurt's College Cult Adopts Him as Literary Guru at 48." Chicago Tribune (15 November 1970): section 5, 1.
McLaughlin, Frank. "An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Media and Methods (May 1973): 38-41, 45-46.
Mitchell, Greg. "Meeting My Maker: A Visit with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., by Kilgore Trout." Crawdaddy (1 April 1974): 42-51.
Musil, Robert. "There Must Be More to Love than Death: A Conversation with Kurt Vonnegut." Nation (2-9 August, 1980): 128-132.
Noble, William T. "'Unstuck in Time' . . . a Real Kurt Vonnegut: The Reluctant Guru of Searching Youth." Detroit Sunday News Magazine (18 June 1972): 14-15, 18, 20, 22-24.
Nuwer, Hank. "A Skull Session with Kurt Vonnegut." South Carolina Review. 19, 2 (Spring 1987): 2-23.
Reasoner, Harry. "Kurt Vonnegut." Transcript of a 1969 Interview in Sixty Minutes CBS News (15 September 1970): 14-17.
Reed, Peter J. “A Conversation with Kurt Vonnegut.” The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Eds. Peter J. Reed and Marc Leeds. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. 3-14.
Reed, Peter J., and Maec Leeds. “On Art, Writing, Fellini, and Time Quake.” The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Eds. Peter J. Reed and Marc Leeds. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. 35-44.
Reilly, Charles. "An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Delaware Literary Review. Spring 1976: 20-27.
Reilly, Charles. "Two Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut." College Literature. 7 (1980): 1-29.
Scholes, Robert. "A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." The Vonnegut Statement: Original Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Eds. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. 90-118.
Sheed, Wilfried. "Requiem to Billy Pilgrim's Progress." Life (21 March 1969): 9.
Sheed, Wilfried. "The Now Generation Knew Him When." Life. 67 (12 September 1969): 64-69.
Shenker, Israel. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Lights Comic Paths of Despair." New York Times (21 March 1969): section 1, 41.
Standish, David. "Playboy Interview." Playboy. 20 (July 1973): 57-60, 62, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 214, 216. Later published in Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons: Opinions. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1974.
Taylor, Robert. "Kurt Vonnegut." Boston Globe Magazine (20 July 1969): 10-12, 14-15.
Todd, Richard. "The Masks of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." New York Times Magazine (24 January 1971): 16-17, 19, 22, 24, 26, 30-31.

[Most of these interviews are collected in:
Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Eds. William Rodney Allen. Jackson, UP of Mississippi, 51999.]
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Понедельник, 02 Ноября 2009 г. 11:50 + в цитатник
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Воскресенье, 01 Ноября 2009 г. 15:30 + в цитатник
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Anna Brown

Суббота, 31 Октября 2009 г. 12:12 + в цитатник
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Teaching the Unteachable

Пятница, 30 Октября 2009 г. 12:13 + в цитатник
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Teaching the Unteachable

By Kurt Vonnegut, August 6, 1967.
Found at The New York Times


You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that, but writers' conferences continue to multiply in the good old American summertime. Sixty-eight of them are listed in last April's issue of The Writer. Next year there will be more. They are harmless. They are shmoos.

I saw one horn five years ago--The Cape Cod Writers' conference in Craigville, Mass. It was more or less prayed into existence by three sweet preachers' wives. They were in middle life. They invited some Cape writers and English teachers to a meeting one winter night, and their spokeswoman said this: "We thought it would be nice if there were a writers' conference on Cape Cod next summer."

I remember another thing she said: "We thought established writers would probably enjoy helping beginners like us to break into the field."

And it came to pass. Isaac Asimov is the star this year. Stars of the past include Richard Kim and Jacques Barzun. Twenty-six students came the first year, forty-three the next, sixty-three the next, eighty-two the next, and nearly one hundred are expected this year-- in August. Most of the students are women. Several of them are preachers' wives in middle life.

So it goes.

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Torture and Blubber

Четверг, 29 Октября 2009 г. 11:18 + в цитатник
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Torture and Blubber

By Kurt Vonnegut, June 30, 1971.
Found at The New York Times


West Barnstable, Mass.,--When I was a young reader of Robin Hood tales and "The White Company" by Arthur Conan Doyle and so on, I came across the verb "blubber" so often that I looked it up. Bad people in the stories did it when good people punished them hard. It means, of course, to weep noisily and without constraint. No good person in a story ever did that.

But it is not easy in real life to make a healthy man blubber, no matter how wicked he may be. So good men have invented appliances which make unconstrained weeping easier--the rack, the boot, the iron maiden, the pediwinkis, the electric chair, the cross, the thumbscrew. And the thumbscrew is alluded to in the published parts of the secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war. The late Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, speaks of each bombing of the North as ". . .one more turn of the screw."

Simply: we are torturers, and we once hoped to win in Indochina and anywhere because we had the most expensive torture instruments yet devised. I am reminded of the Spanish Armada, whose ships had torture chambers in their holds. Protestant Englishmen were going to be forced to blubber.

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Среда, 28 Октября 2009 г. 11:35 + в цитатник
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Everything was beautiful... by crapitalradio

Вторник, 27 Октября 2009 г. 09:45 + в цитатник
verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора
Everything was beautiful...

Hey – Listen:
Kurt Vonnegut has become unstuck in time
And Kilgore Trout has penned his last.
So it goes.

The remnant of slaughterhouse-five is always around,
Treading on the heels of time.
Picking out the moments,
Some not so nice,
And teaching us to laugh at the end,
Thumbing out nose at You-Know-Who.

So God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut,
Or Bokonon – whatever.
It’s all the same
For the laughing prophet of doom
Who grins as ice-nine slips into the ocean.
So it goes.

Remind us again
That we are trapped in the amber
And that even though our fantasist of fire and ice
Is gone,
He is perfectly fine in plenty of other moments –
Chain-smoking, scribbling
Away at some travesty,
Promising to change our lives.
So it goes.

But the artist,
This man, without a country
Though interred,
Has gained citizenship in all our hearts.

We may be trapped in this absurd world
With no damn cat, and no damn cradle,
And they will always drop their bombs.
Let them.
All will be dead and quiet,
But the birds will raise their voices,
In a salute
To the artist
With poignant melancholy wit,
And say the only thing to be said:
Poo-tee-weet?

by crapitalradio
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Понедельник, 26 Октября 2009 г. 10:17 + в цитатник
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The Latest Word - a Review

Воскресенье, 25 Октября 2009 г. 12:29 + в цитатник
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The Latest Word

By Kurt Vonnegut, October 30, 1966.
Found at The New York Times


I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner, was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee's. The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principle and principal, and how to spell cashmere. It is a dear leviathan left to me by my father, "Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language," based on the "International Dictionary" of 1890 and 1900. It doesn't have radar in it, or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole, but I know what they are. One time I actually took sulfathiazole.

And now I have this enormous and beautiful new bomb from Random House. I don't mean "bomb" in a pejorative sense, or in any dictionary sense, for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and pregnant, and makes you think. One of the things it makes you think is that any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling competitors in the American-unabridged-dictionary industry. They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have, then add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.

Random House has thrown in a color atlas of the world, as well, and concise dictionaries of French, Spanish, German and Italian. And would you look at the price? And, lawsy me, Christmas is coming.

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Суббота, 24 Октября 2009 г. 09:27 + в цитатник
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Суббота, 17 Октября 2009 г. 13:02 + в цитатник
verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора
Kilgore Trout, a real American hero.



by The-ez8
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Kurt Vonnegut

Пятница, 16 Октября 2009 г. 09:41 + в цитатник
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Kurt Vonnegut

By Verlyn Klinkenborg, April 13, 2007.
Found at The New York Times


If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.

Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.

He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end. He says not only what no one is saying, but also what — as a mild young person — you know it is forbidden to say. No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith.

So you get older, and it’s been 20 or 30 years since you last read “Player Piano” or “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough. You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose. “It’s not that simple,” you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.

And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut and your life is now the footnote. Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.
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